Anna Moffo

American lyric-dramatic soprano Anna Moffo ascended swiftly during the 1950s to rank among the most celebrated opera singers worldwide and held that stature as a principal artist through the 1970s. Born to Nicolas Moffo and Regina (Cinti) Moffo, she gave her first vocal performance at age seven by singing the African-American spiritual “Mighty Like a Rose” at a school assembly and continued to appear regularly in her hometown and neighboring communities. Her evident physical beauty, paired with her voice, prompted an invitation to audition in Hollywood; she declined the opportunity in favor of formal training and instead secured a four-year scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, studying there with Eugenia Giannini-Gregory.

In 1955 she won the Young Artists Auditions, and a Fulbright Scholarship the same year took her to Italy, where she trained at the Accademica di Santa Cecilia in Rome with Luigi Ricci and Mercedes Llopart while supporting herself as an X-ray technician and typist. Her professional stage debut came as Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale at Spoleto; the warmth and fullness of her lyric timbre drew immediate attention, and her slender, striking appearance made her especially suited to visual media. Television director Mario Lanfranchi cast her as the title character in Butterfly, and the 1956 broadcast instantly established her as a star throughout Italy while extending her reputation internationally. She followed with further televised opera productions, among them Lucia di Lammermoor and La fille du régiment, made her French debut in 1956 as Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni at Aix-en-Provençe, performed widely across Italy, and entered Teatro alla Scala in Falstaff in 1957. Her first American engagement was as Mimi in La Bohème at the Lyric Opera of Chicago; she married Lanfranchi that same year.

On 14 November 1959 she sang Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata for her Metropolitan Opera debut, a role that would prove central to her career. Beginning in 1960 she hosted the Italian television series “The Anna Moffo Show,” which continued until 1973, and Italian voters named her one of the country’s ten most beautiful women. During the 1960-1961 Metropolitan season she appeared as Gilda in Rigoletto, Adina in L’Elisir d’Amore, and Liù in Turandot with Franco Corelli and Birgit Nilsson. A leading recording artist for RCA Victor, she also excelled in such parts as Pamina in The Magic Flute, Luisa Miller, Debussy’s Mélisande, the title heroine of Offenbach’s La Périchole, and all four leading female roles in the same composer’s Les contes d’Hoffmann. She performed regularly at Europe’s foremost opera houses and remained most closely identified with Violetta, which she sang more than nine hundred times, and Lucia di Lammermoor, which she performed five hundred times. In addition to filmed and televised operas she appeared in non-operatic dramatic motion pictures, including the prize-winning Una storia d’amore.

Following her 1972 divorce from Lanfranchi she married Robert Sarnoff, chairman of RCA. By 1974 she had given 220 performances in eighteen operas at the Metropolitan, yet an excess of engagements precipitated a serious vocal collapse that removed her from the stage for two years. Upon returning she concentrated initially on lyric roles before venturing into more dramatic Verdi parts, among them Leonora in Il Trovatore, and added Bellini’s Norma in 1991. In 1999 the Metropolitan Opera marked the fortieth anniversary of her debut with a celebratory gala.